Duathlons
Rosie Wigg, still very much new to riding - let alone racing
- a bike, proved that a decent cardio-vascular system translates well across
disciplines and performed well at only her second ever duathlon. The event was
the Oulton Park Sprint (run 4.3K / bike 21.6K / run 4.3K) held on closed roads
at the Oulton Park motor-racing circuit - an
absolutely exceptional venue for multisport racing. Rose mixed it with full-on
aero bikes (pic) and could easily knock minutes off her time given more biking
experience and an aero setup.
Emma S also featured on the duathlon scene taking on the
hideously hilly and technical Carsington Sprint event in Derbyshire’s Peak
District (read very hilly). The event
is long for a ‘sprint’ and comprised a 5K run, an exceptionally tough 30K bike,
followed by a final leg-killing 5K run. The bike leg is super-serious and
involves lots of slippery surfaces, frighteningly fast and technical descents,
and a total of 231 metres of climbing - much of it up a very tough single fall-off-sideways
kind of hill. Emma paced the whole thing well and put in a very strong bike leg
to finish 5th in age group in a time just sub-two hours. This would
have been 4th but for a very unfortunate and totally unforgivable
cheat in the form of a fellow female competitor who drafted a male club mate
for the whole duration of the bike leg and, unfortunately, escaped detection.
Slow handclap…
Extreme Swims
Steve C returned to the crazy world of extreme swims last
week. This is an esoteric world that tends to feature ridiculous temperatures,
mega-distances, unforgiving sea currents, or some other fiendish twist that
makes the already-difficult business of open-water swimming even harder than it
needs to be. Steve’s most recent near-death adventure involved a (theoretical)
500 metre distance and involved the compulsory use of a glow
stick. No open water swim should
ever require the compulsory use of such a thing.
Cutting to the chase, Steve excelled in the mind-over-matter
challenge of this particular night swim and though finishing well up the
overall field still managed to actually notice and enjoy the moon and starlit
experience - all this in spite of clocking a GPS-recorded distance of 680m.
Sighting in open water is notoriously difficult as it is; sighting in open
water in the dark is altogether just on a different level.